#but i suppose when you've written over 300k words for something that happens.

[fantasyinallforms]

Bagginshield feels so safe to me. It's become a blanket I can wrap myself up in and breath a little easier. They're nestled into the corner of my heart.

[swaps55]

Hi swaps! You've mentioned in the past that Sonata was meant to be an AU - when did and what made you decide that it was going to be canon?

You are correct!! Sonata was supposed to be a silly, one-shot crack!fic AU.

Whoops.

So, what happened is this: I started writing Cantata in 2019, but I hadn't written much in a while, and I was rusty. So I was doing a lot of...throwing spaghetti at a wall. But while a lot of pieces of Opus were still very malleable, there were a few things I knew for sure, and this was one of them:

I was setting up a long-haul slow burn, with epic levels of pining that would never quite turn into something spoken out loud until ME3, when in mid-tender embrace, Sam would ask the question, "Do you love me?" And Kaidan would reply, "I have loved you for eight years."

THAT WAS THE PLAN. I was committed to this plan.

I'd written the first chapter of Cantata and chunks of what became Million Little Pieces, Dance With Darkness and Carry On, but I had zero narrative tension working in any of those scenes, and quite honestly, I had no idea what I was doing. Then I started working on The Things We've Done. I had them stranded on Sharjila, Sam in bad shape, and they were upset with each other. But I had no idea what landed them there, or why they were angry at each other. Basically, when I put myself in a position that forced some narrative tension, I couldn't fucking figure out what the tension was. I didn't know enough about what made them tick to get the pieces to fit into place.

So, I was frustrated, but still all aflutter about this slow burn pinefest, and in a fit of giddiness I said fuck it, and reblogged a post about tropes like fake dating and oh no, there's only one bed! And dared someone to ask me to write one of them.

@makoparkingonly took the dare for fake dating, and a few days later I had an out of control freight train I couldn't steer careening off the tracks.

I was dead set on keeping it an AU. There was no way this ridiculous premise could be canon for these two people. Nope. No way.

But what changed my mind was the character development. The friendship that formed between Joker and Tali, and the confiding Sam did with Liara, the progress Kaidan made with his parents, and the gut wrenching tenderness and care Sam and Kaidan gave each other felt so genuine, and so important to them as characters, that I couldn't bear to take it back. All the trouble I was having figuring out what made them tick for Cantata? I found it in Sonata. I figured out Sharjila, and where they found both friction and understanding. I understood how important they were to each other.

They did all of that, all on their own, and it just felt cruel to pretend it never happened.

So I embraced it, and my OTP, the two very smart and capable people I have now written well probably over 300k words for, canonically get together via a fake dating scheme and I have to take it seriously. Like, I wrote these sentences in Fugue, as a serious person, taking fake dating seriously:

“Joker said something about my mother being part of their task force to shove the two of us together.”

Shepard chuckles, covering his face with his free hand. “Fuck. Do you think she knew the truth?”

“That we were letting her believe we were together when we weren’t? I don’t know how. But I intend to strangle our pilot to find out.”

But I stand by it, with no regrets. XD